Posts by Alan Brown

Fancy building a replacement for Post Office's disastrous Horizon system?

Re: EPOS

And working correctly?

Post Office slapped down for late disclosure of documents in Horizon scandal inquiry

Re: First Class

There's considerable speculation that the very obvious preparation for private selloff was stopped because anyone doing Due Diligence would have found what was going on - and if it was concealed, they'd have multibillion pound claims against the sellers

Re: her credibility for preaching & giving sermons on Christian values

Heinlein floated this idea a few times, particularly in his Lazarus Long series (drag them in kicking and screaming, with time off for good behaviour)

Franchise can be summarised as "one man, one vote - the man to be selected randomly" and is part of Ike's Multivac story arc

Re: De-Frocked

But that's all OK because they can repent and God Will Forgive Them

(It's a common mindset and my experience is that "christians" are more frequently the nastiest pieces of work around because of it)

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

Re: This feels like an own goal...

HP have been losing corporate sales for a long time

Procurement managers noticed a long time ago that HP printers (even the lasers) were the most expensive to run, not particularly reliable and didn't have very high print quality compared to the competition

Re: never again

There are definite use cases where inkjets have advantages - but general printing of text on paper isn't one of them

Incidentally, printing volumes started collapsing in the mid 2010s and have steadily trended downwards ever since. The advent of tablets and phablets turned out to be what the market was waiting for

UK health department republishes £330M Palantir contract with fewer ██████

Re: "is trying to lock future governments into"

The fastest and easiest way to solve the NHS funding problem is to abolish the cap on NI

"I don't get why this data is regarded as so valuable in terms of advertising drugs."

That's not why they want it. Medical insurers salivate at this kind of data as it allows them to increase premiums and deny cover

As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot real estate

wrt the renewables comment:

The _vast_ majority of renewables operations are farming subsidies, not electricity

Re: Idiocy at it's best.

See my comments about molten salt nuclear power

The MSRE was Alvin Weinberg's "industrial prototype" model, after the "Laboratory demonstrator" which was the Nautilus and Shippingport - nuclear power's high costs and stupidly long build times are a direct result of industry taking the demonstrator and scaling it up massively, with encouragement from the US Military because it got rid of a pesky problem (enriched uranium(*))

The project was killed by Nixon because it would have divorced civil power from the dependency on military waste products and the Pentagon brass really hated that idea

MSR designs at GW or larger scale(**) don't need stupidly expensive pressure vessels and even more stupidly expensive pressure containment buildings surrounding them, which means they can be built quickly whilst providing even greater safety than existing nuclear power designs

That means that dozens of them can be built relatively easily. It would probably take longer to build the non-nuclear side, but existing coal plants could be adapted to get their steam from MSRs (Conventional nuclear reactors can only produce wet steam, which is corrosive on turbines)

The other advantage of MSR designs is that the core parts can be mass produced relatively easily and shipped where needed (a prebuilt reactor core is truckable at 3-5GW)

(*) Weinberg used lightly enriched uranium on the Nautilus because it was avalable and thorium wasn't. The military had hundreds of tons of the stuff they wanted to get rid of and were happy to give it away - they wanted depleted uranium because this is the feedstock for making bomb plutonium. This is why USA stockpiles of depleted uranium are kept under armed guard on military facilities

(**) If proven scalable - but there's no reason to think they won't scale easily. Weinberg was _very_ thorough in his work on this. China's SINAP TMSR series work at Wu Wei is directly chasing that question as well as the viability of thorium fuelling in ways that address any potential proliferation issues (ie: in-loop conversion - TMSR-LF1 was fired up last year with a small U235 kickstarter load and 50kg of thorium. It's two years late but that's ONLY because the Chinese regulators insisted that isotopically pure lithium be used to avoid producing tritium)

Re: Anticipating grid failure is more like it..

There's an economic limit on electrical transmission of about 1500 miles(*) if you're using million volt(**) HVDC interconnectors, substantially less for AC lines

The bigger problem for private wire feeds is obtaining rights of way for the pylons. That's why siting close to source is desireable (land is usually dirt cheap around power stations anyway)

(*) Which puts a spanner in the works of most "scale up renewables by paving the deserts in PV panels" advocacy

(**) This is about the limit. Higher voltages tend to arc over to ground too easily even if the towers are made taller

Re: Anticipating grid failure is more like it..

If/when Molten Salt Liquid Fuelled Nuclear proves scalability (SINAP TMSR-LF1), then you won't need electricity to produce H2 - these run at 800C or thereabouts which is hot enough to directly crack water

H2 will still be stupidly expensive compared to electricity due to the overall inefficiencies in the cycle, meaning reticulated H2 gas systems is a non-starter (nobody will buy it - piped H2 proponents are trying to sell a "new, improved buggy whip" in an age of automobiles)

For transport use, if you have the amount of energy available to produce industrial scale hydrogen then you're better off spending more energy to tack on atmospheric carbon atoms to produce hydrocarbons and transport/distribute those instead, at 1% or so of the cost of trying to keep hydrogen cold/compressed/contained. This will still be expensive fuel but there's no viable substitute for longhaul aviation in the immediate future (batteries don't have the energy density and mach 5 vactrains don't exist - yet)

For ground transport, batteries win out over H2 on the cost front too (as well as the fully fuelled range, H2 cars don't perform well in this regard, essentially being "BEVs, with added complexity/disadvantages")

The market for H2/hydrocarbon fuelled vehicles will be very small when diesel/petrol is over US$10/US gal in the USA and likely far higher elsewhere (It's already peaked past $9/gal in Britain twice in the last decade)

Molten fuel nuclear reactors have a bunch of other advantages, mostly due to not being giant steam bombs - including being able to fully load follow and should be around 80% cheaper to build/run than existing nuclear plants with greater safety margins and 99% less waste - at which point they'll probably make renewables obsolete by undercutting them

Interestingly, it SHOULD be possible to use a Molten Salt nuclear reactor as a substitute for the burners in a coal-fired plant as the entire reactor/containment building would be about 1/4 the size of those burners. It appears that China may have been planning for this option when looking at the layouts of coal-fired power stations built there over the last 20 years as there are patches of open ground beside the turbine halls not usually seen around traditional stations

We really have to bite the bullet on nuclear power. Whilst it's theoretically possible that renewables might match existing electrical generation, that's only 1/3 of our carbon emissions and decarbonising the rest is likely to require 6-8 times more electrical generation capacity than currently exists

Re: Anticipating grid failure is more like it..

ALL intermittent supply generators should be required to fit buffering in front of the national grid feeds - AT THEIR OWN EXPENSE - right now this is another hidden subsidy

Added advantages

There's a LOT of waste heat going begging near power plants. It's an ideal location for greenhouses/vertical farms (depending on available land area), etc

The waste heat is "free", so can also be used to drive "inefficient" ammonia bubble pump chilling/freezing plants too - which would be an added attraction for bitbarns/hyperscalers

Ransomware can mean life or death at hospitals. DEF CON hackers to the rescue?

Another solution...

I am really surprised that members of these ransomware crews aren't starting to turn up "Dead, in 'interesting' ways"

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

He _did_ insist that the ecosystem be integrated and data was portable across all applications - that was innovative

The rest was pretty wrapping paper and better UIs around existent items - one can argue that Jobs' contribution was to insist on USABILITY first and foremost

Re: iOS App stores should not be under Apple control

It's a similar problem to telcos - a vertically integrated monopoly

There are good reasons why the aviation and automotive industries were forced to divest this model in the 1930s and whilst it's causing Tesla some issues in various US states, it's generally worked fairly well at avoiding monopoly abuse

"They are consumer products."

With the element of consumer choice as to HOW they use the devices removed

Insider steals 79,000 email addresses at work to promote own business

Re: Slap on the wrist?

"A minimum of £5/head would be good"

Unless and until the UK imposes statutory minimum damages, this won't happen, because demonstrable per-recipient damages are pence

That's the REASON the USA TCPA was created to deal with fax spam and the per-message penmalties were written into law

It doesn't help that NOBODY in the media is pointing out that email marketing is "cost shifted" where the recipients bear the vast majority of the total costs. Cost shifting was made illegal in other venues a long time ago for the abuse reason (it's also why mailing a letter went from "recipient pays" to "sender pays" over 200 years ago, with a stamp to prove it)

Re: Slap on the wrist?

A police caution is persistent and shows up on criminal record searches

As part of getting a caution, the miscreant is explicitly acknowledging in writing that they are guilty of the accusation - hence the CRB marker

It's not quite a wet bus ticket, but if they do it again they won't get a second caution - and part of the caution usually includes conditions to abide by which will upgrade the caution to a prosecution if breached - where the admission of guilt will be used going forward

Persistent memory to replace DRAM, but it could take a decade

Re: Its gonna be hard to supplant DRAM

"because people don't like batteries"

With good reason. They leak.

Supercaps aren't much better. I had THREE Zeusram drives fail and every single one had capactor guts eating the tracks away inside

Re: Its gonna be hard to supplant DRAM

"Basically, it's Optane again"

Yup. The problem isn't matching what exists NOW but matching what exists when you finally get the product to market - and beat it on price

Optane, reram, mram and others have been playing this catchup game since the 1980s.

That's not to say it's a hopeless endeavour but 2030s might be a tad optimistic, given NAND can be made faster/higher endurance by stepping back to larger cells and whilst VNAND takes a lot of that cell size pressure away, it paves the way for VDRAM too

Duo face 20 years in prison over counterfeit iPhone scam

Re: Criminal geniuses

If criminals are smart enough to not get caught, they have the smarts to operate a sucessful genuine company and make even more money (or establish a religion, where the marks willingly hand over money and aggressively defend the scammers)

Re: Wrong company

"I'm always equal parts impressed, amazed, and horrified at some of the things these Chinese people come up with."

These aren't new things. I recall a scam reported in Japan in ~1978, where failed 4 kilobit memory chips sold to be used as dummies(*) for a handheld game were relabelled and sold on - they were out of spec but mostly still worked

Going back another century, fake parts were a big problem coming out of the USA

(*) non-functional but fitted for cosmetic purposes

Avast shells out $17M to shoo away claims it peddled people's personal data

I have a habit of reviving such threads with pointers to these kinds of cases

It just helps a little when someone uses a search engine in future

Home Depot sent my email, details of stuff I bought to Meta, customer complains

Re: Annnnnnnd...

so do I - it's a 070

UK readers will know that calling one of these can cost the caller up to £1.50/min whilst not being an obvious 0900

US cities are going to struggle to green up their act by 2050

Re: Chicago is South of Rome

Correct. A great circle map centred on my house there had the entire circumference covered by Madrid and its suburbs

Re: An "easy" fix

In general in hot climates it's better to design for passive solar than to try and bruteforce with AC and solar PV

Solar chimneys are one example of ancient building cooling tech

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Re: Being polite is great

And not revealed that I didn't have the documentation

Boss at one of Microsoft's largest resellers quits, admits secret share deals

I wonder if this has anything to do with tribbles (a bit like Windows, they eat everything)

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

Re: If they *really* want to improve the experience....

In this case it's deliberate and intended to discourage you from applying

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

Re: Grant Shapps was on board..

Nope. It was Jeremy Corbin

IT consultant fined for daring to expose shoddy security

Re: "fined for daring to expose shoddy security"

Which is more or less what happened to the outfit who were hired to audit Horizon

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Re: Responsibility

It's rather hard to bolt a row of racks to a wall when you need access front and rear

Bolting them to the floor might seem the obvious move, but most server rooms use tiles on a raised subfloor, so it's not as secure a method as you may think

Some racks (eg: Prizm) have an option of pull-out stabilising arms in the plinth to mitigate the risks when sliding heavy kit out: https://www.dcdi.co.uk/server-cabinet-plinth-with-stabilizing-arm

Re: Responsibility

"In theory at least it is 'best' to have the UPS's at the top of the rack"

There are bloody good reasons to not allow UPSes in a server room _at all_ - sulphuric acid fumes and fire risk featuring highly on that list

They should be in their own (well ventilated) space

" so having a second (or third) warm body to do the lift and shift is easier on everyone's bodies."

My experience with racking jobs is that if you need a second body to lift something into position in a rack then you just quadrupled the risk and a 3rd is just plain reckless from the outset

There's a reason lifting equipment exists. It's not that expensive in the overall scheme of things and is a LOT cheaper than injury compensation claims

"the Great Hard Drive Shower fiasco"

This sounds like procedural fails are happening in multiple ways at that site, with an even larger risk being taken to avoid repeating a failure of supervisors to supervise

Re: More than enough blame to go around

> ...with the unspoken implication being that you didn't need help...

"If it's marked as 'heavy' then 2 people (or lifting equipment) are mandatory, as is a handling plan. I don't want to be prosecuted for breaching HSE regulations and I'm sure you don't either, so please draw up the plan"

Rice isn't nice for drying your iPhone, according to Apple

Re: Save those desiccant packs found in items you buy

Or just microwave at about 6mins per kg of dessicant

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

Re: worshipping upon the altars of greed and pridefulness has been at best, unseemly.

"Weekly prostration is not a requirement to have a decent moral compass"

The fact that some people only present a "decent moral compass" on the basis of eternal damnation if they don't is rather worrying

I've repeatedly see such people imply that without such restraint they'd be mass murderers

OSIRIS-REx probe sucked up more asteroid crumbs than hoped

"I think Arecibo was the largest radio dish with no other single dish system anywhere near its size"

There's a larger one in China - but it's strictly receive-only

"life would have needed to develop between the time Mars' surface solidified and 4 billion years ago"

There was liquid water on Mars surface for a brief period - and presumably enough of an insulating layer of gas to retain the sun's heat (bearing in mind that the sun was 20-30% dimmer than today).

It's hard enough to find protolife fossils on Earth, let alone with the limited resources available to exploration robots and some wild-ass guesswork about where it might have been on Mars. This is likely to remain a mystery for a long time

I wouldn't argue that amino acids are "life", however it's certainly possible that having the building blocks premade in space speeds up initial development of it on suitable planets

It will be interesting to see what we find preserved out in the Oort cloud, in the very distant future

Japan launches satellite to eyeball derelict rocket stage

Re: Is it just me...

Yup

The USSR approached the USA with a proposal for banning nukes in space after a couple of diasterous experiments. The USA readily agreed because of their own disasterous experiment (Starfish Prime) - which killed Telstar despite that satellite being launched a week AFTER the nuke was tested

(For the unaware: The nuke not only instantly killed everything in visible range, it took out stuff on the far side of the planet too. Telstar hit the charged particle clouds left behind (essentially a temporary low level Van Allen belt) and degraded rapidly)

That said, I suspect this is a bogeyman. If anyone wants to actually "nuke" space a sounding rocket is more than sufficient to loft high enough to do serious damage and won't set off ICBM alerts

Chunks of deorbiting ESA satellite are expected to reach the ground

Re: If it lands on my garage...

Of the Orange and Sassy kind?

https://youtu.be/lwrQ0ZFmZcg?t=46

Japanese space lasers aim to clean up orbital junk

Re: If you can knock down space junk

Some proposals involve sending "puffs" of upper atmosphere upwards to aerobrake LEO junk

Re: This is laudable

This has been the fundamental objection to laser brooms (terrestrial or space-based) since they were proposed - along with virtually all other manouverable "deorbiting" systems

If you can bring down junk you can also bring down satellites of those "unfriendly" to you

Despite the need, spacefaring nations still won't agree to a jointly operated facility with strict oversight - the politics just keep getting in the way

Easier to have the laser on the ground

This proposal isn't new and it's much easier to provide the necessary laser powwer from terrestrial sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_broom

Apart from the obvious (bringing down individual sats), a laser broom can bring down small debris by illuminating the known paths of such things - satellite-mounted lasers will have trouble coping with the 1-5cm range of sizes

Virgin Media to stand up rival network operator to BT Openreach

Chorus/Spark

When New Zealand _properly_ cleaved Telecom NZ into two _entirely_ separate companies (one handling lines, one handling services/dialtones), the line side started happily sellling duct space and maintenance services to ALL former "competitors" including the NZ equivalent to VM

Can you imagine OR facilitating VM laying cables to endusers? That's what happened

Britain missed an opportunuty, as usual due to regulatory capture and payola

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

Re: Lets imagine for a moment that you had to have a valid identity

And when the website is in another country?

You're making assumptions that simply don't stack up. I've been warning people for 30 years that the Internet contains many equivalants of the dodgy back street along the waterfront, but the means to access it trivially - it's not a place for young kids to access unsupervised, blocking software simply doesn't work and the best defense is to teach them both that the bad stuff exists and there are bad people out there - both online and nearby, some posing as family friends

"people don't show pictures by default on the street of death and porn"

That entirely depends on the streets you walk upon and when